During a meeting recently, a colleague mentioned attending a tree lighting ceremony on November 9—more than a month and a half before Christmas and several weeks before the start of Advent. I was taken aback by the ceremony’s timing, and I said as much to the others on the call. They looked at me strangely (“Must be some weird Catholic thing,” I could nearly hear them thinking), and, after discovering my reaction wasn’t shared, we moved on to the meeting’s agenda.
But the conversation stuck with me. How to explain this cultural moment? A moment in which tree lighting ceremonies have been cut off from the liturgical season and when even noting it seems eccentric?
I’d like to advance a hypothesis that we are in the midst of a cultural struggle that hasn’t been fully appreciated: the war on Advent.
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